2008/05/07: CNN: U.S. envoy: Myanmar deaths may top 100,000Condoleezza Rice speaking with other nations in hopes of boosting aid – Diplomat says 12-foot storm surges caused most of the damage – U.N. official said nearly 2,000 square miles still underwater – Aid groups and countries frustrated by their lack of access to Myanmar

2008/05/06: BBC: Mangrove loss ‘left Burma exposed’Destruction of mangrove forests in Burma left coastal areas exposed to the devastating force of the weekend’s cyclone, a top politician suggests. ASEAN secretary-general Surin Pitsuwan said coastal developments had resulted in mangroves, which act as a natural defence against storms, being lost

2008/05/09: BBC: Burma cyclone raises rice pricesRice prices have risen for a sixth consecutive day as global supplies continue to be stretched by cyclone damage to crops in Burma. With worldwide demand also at a record high, the cost of rice rose as much as 5.1% to $23.45 per 100lb in electronic trading on the Chicago Board of Trade

2008/05/09: SMH: More fears for world food supplyCyclone Nargis has raised a new question as Asia scrambles to find affordable food: will crop damage force Burma to join the clamour for rice imports? Rising prices suggest the answer is yes. The price of rice jumped this week, a sign that traders see a further squeeze on a tight global market. Damage to the Irrawaddy delta, Burma’s low-lying rice-growing region, means the country is likely to move from being a modest exporter to a big importer, traders say.

2008/05/07: BBC: Cyclone fuels rice price increaseRice prices have risen for the fourth consecutive day, as tight supplies are aggravated by the disaster in Burma’s key rice-growing region. The cost of rice, the staple food for almost half the world’s population, increased by 2.4% to $21.6 per 100lb on the Chicago Board of Trade. Cyclone Nargis, which has killed tens of thousands of people, struck areas where 65% of Burma’s rice is grown

Yes we have feedbacks:

2008/05/05: TruthOut: Freezing to Show Warming TrendThough dismissed in Russia, scientist’s climate research in remote Siberia is heating up discussions in the West. Chersky, Russia – Sergei Zimov waded through knee-deep snow to reach a frozen lake where so much methane belches out of the melting permafrost that it spews from the ice like small geysers. In the frigid twilight, the Russian scientist struck a match to make a jet of the greenhouse gas visible. The sudden plume of fire threw him backward. Zimov stood up, brushed the snow off his parka and beamed. “Sometimes a big explosion happens, because the gas comes out like a bomb,” Zimov said. “There are a million lakes like this in northern Siberia.” In a country where many scientists scoff at the existence of global warming, Zimov has been waging a lonely campaign to warn the world about Russia’s melting permafrost and its nexus with climate change. His laboratory is the vast expanse of tundra and larch forest along the East Siberian Sea, an icy corner of the world that Zimov has scrutinized almost entirely on his own for 28 years

2008/05/08: SMH: Koalas’ future: hot, hungryKoalas are under threat from climate change because rising temperatures and carbon dioxide levels will affect the availability of their food, an Australian scientist has warned. Ian Hume, of the University of Sydney, said his team had found, in laboratory experiments, that increases in carbon dioxide levels could reduce the amount of available nutrients and increase the amount of toxins in eucalyptus leaves.

2008/05/07: CBC: Pollution hurts food supply of Australia’s koala bear, researchers sayKoalas are threatened by the rising level of carbon dioxide pollution in the atmosphere because it saps nutrients from the eucalyptus leaves they feed on, a researcher said Wednesday. Ian Hume, emeritus professor of biology at Sydney University, said he and his researchers also found that the amount of toxicity in the leaves of eucalyptus saplings rose when the level of carbon dioxide within a greenhouse was increased

And then there are the world’s forests:

2008/05/07: Eureka: Amazon under threat from cleaner airThe Amazon rainforest, so crucial to the Earth’s climate system, is coming under threat from cleaner air say prominent UK and Brazilian climate scientists in the leading scientific journal Nature. The new study identifies a link between reducing sulphur dioxide emissions from burning coal and increasing sea surface temperatures in the tropical north Atlantic, resulting in a heightened risk of drought in the Amazon rainforest

2008/05/10: CNN: Severe weather kills 10 in Missouri, OklahomaPerson killed near Carthage, Missouri, when a tree fell on a mobile home – Five people killed when a tornado touched down in Oklahoma, reports NWS – A tornado touched down about 6 p.m. near the Missouri-Kansas border – Numerous injuries were also reported, and U.S. 60 closed because of debris

2008/05/06: Eureka: Expert predicts ‘Monsoon Britain’Prepare for more floods – in ways we are not used to – that’s the message from experts at Durham University who have studied rainfall and river flow patterns over 250 years. Last summer was the second wettest on record and experts say we must prepare for worse to come.

2008/05/07: EnergyDaily: U.S. plans two large-scale CO2 projectsThe U.S. Department of Energy says it has awarded more than $126.6 million for its fifth and sixth large-scale carbon sequestration projects. The awards went to the West Coast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership, or WESTCARB, and the Midwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership, MRCSP. The Energy Department said the projects in California and Ohio will demonstrate the ability of geologic formations to safely, permanently and economically store more than 1 million tons of carbon dioxide.

2008/05/06: SMH: Burying coal fumes a ‘smokescreen’Carbon capture and storage technology, which is central to the Federal Government’s climate change strategy, is a mirage that is damaging efforts to develop renewable energy, a global report [False Hope] funded by Greenpeace has found. The report was criticised yesterday by the resources industry and the mining union, which are relying on the technology to cut down emissions from coal-burning power stations. The debate surrounding carbon capture and storage is intensifying as the resources industry attempts to bargain for concessions while the Federal Government ponders the design of an emissions trading scheme.

2008/05/08: DailyIndia: Stressed seaweed might make cloudy skiesBritish-led scientists say they’ve discovered the presence of large amounts of seaweed along coastal areas can influence the Earth’s climate. The international study led by Frithjof Kupper of the Scottish Association for Marine Science found brown seaweeds, when under stress, release large quantities of inorganic iodine into the coastal atmosphere, where it can contribute to cloud formation.

2008/05/08: DailyIndia: Scientists propose super-supercomputerThree U.S. government scientists are proposing to improve climate change predictions by creating a kind of super-supercomputer. Michael Wehner and Lenny Oliker of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and John Shalf of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center said one of the greatest challenges to understanding how human activity is changing global climate is not being able to develop accurate cloud simulations.

2008/05/07: BBC: Carbon market’s value hits $64bnThe market that enables companies to buy and sell the right to pollute doubled in value in 2007, according to a World Bank report. The value of the carbon market hit $64bn in 2007, from $32bn in 2006

The Gore-apalooza is still bopping along:

2008/05/10: BBC: Cash cuts see green grants halvedThe number of government grants made to people who want to fit solar panels or other green energy systems to their homes has halved, the BBC has learned. It comes after the low carbon buildings programme cut the maximum grant on offer from £7,500 to £2,500. The Renewable Energy Association, which says the programme is failing, has accused ministers of complacency.

2008/05/09: BBC: Centrica warns on wind farm costsCentrica, one of the UK’s biggest energy generators, has warned that the prospect of making money from wind farms is looking “marginal”. The company says that the rising cost of off-shore wind farms could end up ruining the government’s renewable energy targets. The comments come a week after Shell withdrew from a project that was set to become the world’s largest wind farm. The government wants 33 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity built by 2020.

2008/05/09: SMH: Carbon-neutral NSW by 2020All NSW Government operations, including state-run schools, hospitals and police stations, will be made carbon neutral in less than 12 years, the Premier, Morris Iemma, said yesterday. The move will lead to major changes in hundreds of state-run agencies, as they struggle to make drastic cuts to energy use by 2020, a decade after the Federal Government’s national emissions-trading scheme comes into play

2008/05/08: SMH: Carbon capture crucial to coal future: summitAustralia has no choice but to rely heavily on carbon capture and storage to cut its greenhouse gas emissions in time to make a difference on climate change, delegates to the NSW Government’s “clean coal” summit were told. The warning came as new research by the CSIRO indicated the world was warming more quickly than predicted. The architect of Australia’s climate change review, Ross Garnaut, has thrown his weight behind carbon capture technology as a way of lowering the nation’s greenhouse emissions in the medium term. “Coal is set to play a big role in future Australian prosperity, so long as we can deal effectively with an inconvenient truth,” Professor Garnaut told the coal summit.

2008/05/06: ABC(Au): Conservation group want Budget changes to fuel subsidyThe Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) wants mining and transport companies excluded from getting fuel subsidies in next week’s Federal Budget. The ACF estimates mining companies like BHP Billiton are benefiting by up to $138 million a year in subsidised fuel through the fuel tax credits scheme

2008/05/08: CBC: Alliant still awaiting word from government on MDA sale[…] Four weeks ago, Industry Minister Jim Prentice rejected the proposed $1.3 billion sale of Richmond, B.C.-based MDA’s space and information systems divisions to Alliant Techsystems Inc., arguing the deal had no “net benefit” for Canada. Alliant had 30 days to persuade the government otherwise, but that review period ends today, the same day the Minnesota-based company issued its year-end earnings.

2008/05/06: News(Au): Global warming today’s Great DepressionGlobal warming could have the same economic effect as the Great Depression if handled poorly, the Government’s top climate change adviser says. Professor Ross Garnaut has written an article saying that poor design or slowness in implementing climate change-easing policies could spell the end of what he calls the Platinum Age

IPAT [Impact = Population * Affluence * Technology] raised its head once again:

2008/05/05: GristMill: Word puzzles – Washington Post reporter not allowed to say what he knows about climate legislation costs [media][…] To point out the obvious: Engler is a lobbyist for dirty industries. The NAM study of climate costs was an absurd hack job that was disavowed, in a footnote in the report itself, by the agency that was hired to do it. What Keohane and Goldmark did is take scenarios from five respected groups of economists and average their results. The result they produced is not from “environmentalists.” It is from the most respected economists in the field. So what you have is not a “predictable” squabble between “industrialists and environmentalists.” What you have is the professional economics community on one side and the dirty energy lobby on the other (which really is predictable). Another way of saying this is: climate legislation isn’t going to cost all that much, and the dirty energy lobby is full of shit That’s the reality. But how many WaPo readers are going to squint between the lines to suss this conclusion out?

2007/05/21: MediaChannel: Searching For The New “Propaganda Model”…one mainstream corporate journalist there… explained the “model’s focus on the filters” that much news has to pass through: Stripped down for purposes of, as Chomsky would say, typical media “concision,” they are:ownership interests, advertiser concerns, the nature of journalists’ sources, flak (or negative feedback) and ideology.

2008/05/08: EnvFin: Huge jump in US wind installationsMore than 1,400MW of new wind energy capacity, costing $3 billion, was installed in the US in the first quarter of 2008 — up from just 124MW in the same period of 2007, according to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA)

2008/05/05: FinPo: Quebec plans US$2-billion wind park projectRepower Systems AG, a German wind- turbine builder, will supply turbines for a US$2-billion, 954-megawatt wind power project planned in Quebec, Canada, one of the largest contracts in the industry. The project, which consists of five wind farms, is due to go into service between December 2011 and December 2015, Repower said in a statement on OTS newswire Monday

P.S. Recent postings can be found in the week archive and the ancient postings can be accessed here, which should open to this.

“Alas, the frequency of storms cannot be reduced by killing butterflies.”-Robert L. Park, commenting on Edward N. Lorenz’s lecture _Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?_

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